It’s hard to miss the buzz around mobile. Smartphones equipped with near field communications to instantly share video and voice control to allow for a handsfree web experience.New tablets like the Microsoft Surface, iPad Mini and Kindle Fire HD are tearing up the advertising airwaves. But mobile is not just another chapter in the smaller, faster, cheaper device story. And it’s not tiny web or shrunken PC applications. Instead, mobile is the flash point for a holistic, far-reaching change for your business. Your app is in your customer’s pocket. What will you do with that privilege? The answer is that you will deliver mobile engagement experiences that empower people with smart apps and products to take the next most likely action in their immediate context and moments of need. Mobile engagement experiences focus on people and their needs, not companies and their processes.

Over the last year, Ted Schadler and I have interviewed literally hundreds of CIOs, technology vendors, integrators and mobile design firms to capture and codify the state of the art in mobile engagement. And we’ve seen some great examples along the way as:

Customers hive around smartphone apps that deliver service at their convenience. Consumers download and use apps from Walgreens, American Airlines, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, and 700,000 other app builders. Walgreens has a best-in-class app for reordering prescription drugs. Refill from your account, scan your prescription bar code, or type in the prescription number. Then automatically refill at a nearby store.

One of the most enjoyable tasks as a Forrester analyst is reviewing all of the Groundswell awards submissions. And we know many of you also look forward to seeing the innovative approaches that other B2B companies use to listen to and engage with customers. This year, we received 45 entries and we judged submissions across seven categories: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Spreading, Supporting, Embracing, and Mobile.

Earlier in November, we announced the winners and then presented a Webinar to Forrester clients where we discussed the awards process, criteria, highlights, and named all the winners. And we described why they won their awards as well as featuring many other entries that we thought warranted an honorable mention.

Download this podcast to hear more from Kim Celestre, Zachary Reiss-Davis, and myself about the Groundswell B2B Awards (it runs for around 45 minutes):

2013 is going to be an amazing year for mobile and web developers for a number of reasons, but the top one on my list today is the advance in tooling. This isn't simply a turn of the crank adding a few features/functions to the existing state of the art but instead the realization of a growing paradigm shift in how developers (experience creators, to quote my colleague Mike Gualtieri) create software. Today the majority of web and mobile apps are written by developers manually writing source code in text editors or IDEs, but tomorrow's tooling is becoming much more visual in nature. Here are the three tooling areas that excite me looking forward to 2013.

This summer Switzerland’s incumbent carrier, Swisscom, launched a simple but revolutionary new mobile tariff, Natel Infinity. Infinity is a speed-based tariff that comes in the versions XS, S, M, L, and XL, which represent download speeds ranging from 200 kbit/s to 100 Mbit/s. Prices range from CHF59 to CHF169 per month (€49 to €139). Significantly, the tariff throws in unlimited national voice, SMS messaging services, and data usage without any additional charge (XL even comes with unlimited international calls to most destinations and SMS).

The idea is simple: The greater your urge for fast mobile services, the more you pay — irrespective of which apps you use and how you wish to communicate. All that matters is speed. In this respect, Swisscom has replicated for the mobile world a tariff approach that is already fairly common in the fixed-line world. I believe this move by Swisscom is noteworthy in two respects:

It effectively pulls the rug from under the OTT voice and messaging services like WhatsApp and Tango by removing the arbitrage potential created by time- or distance-based pricing schemes.

It brings in line capital spending on and actual demand for network infrastructure capacity.